The Smart and the Ruined: Notes on the New Social Factory

It has become habitual to associate the smart city with greenfield megaprojects in deserts and on reclaimed land, where the ideal of ubiquitous sensing infrastructures coexists with the realities of banal and expendable architecture. Smart cities, according to media historian Orit Halpern, operate as perpetual prototypes that follow a logic of software development. They are facets of a pervasive "smartness mandate" that calls for optimizing humans' ability to adapt to the urban environment by means of extensive computational infrastructures, as much as it delivers a "political imperative that smartness be extended to all areas of life." Considering the significant impact of smart policies on the extant fabric of cities around the world, the smart city is not only a developmental but increasingly a redevelopmental strategy.